In The First Half Of 2013, The U.S. Made 12,444 Data Requests From Yahoo

Following on the heels of Google and Facebook, Yahoo today published its first transparency report detailing government requests for user data in the first half of 2013. It intends to issue a transparency report every six months.

Of the 17 countries highlighted, the U.S. leads with the most number of requests, asking the Sunnyvale, California-based search engine for user data 12,444 times regarding 40,322 accounts. Of these requests, Yahoo obliged on 4,604 of them, disclosing content from email, Flickr, calendar, address book entries, and posts on Yahoo properties.

The company also disclosed non-content data for 6,798 accounts, or subscriber information captured at the time of registration, such as name, location, IP address, login details, and billing information. Though Yahoo notes national security requests were included in its aggregate statistics, this was not broken out for any of the countries. The total number of government requests worldwide make up less than 0.01% of Yahoo users, the company said.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, New Zealand made the fewest number of data requests, with only nine during the first half of the year. Yahoo disclosed content data in five of those instances.